How Big is a Nutshell?

Last week Philip Hallstrom posted Ruby in a Nutshell... offering a quick visual comparison of four of O'Reilly's books and dramatically illustrating how much simpler Ruby is than Java. Inspired by this, I just spent a few minutes poking around the O'Reilly web site to construct what we might call the "Nutshell Index": how many pages it takes to cover the essentials of a language or technology. Without further ado:

 224 Ruby
 240 UML
 352 Rails
 384 PHP
 576 MySQL
 576 Cocoa
 592 SQL
 624 C
 720 XML
 742 Python
 768 Perl
 768 VB.NET
 816 C++
 832 Web design
 944 Linux
1046 C#
1264 Java

And yes, I know this has no statistical validity at all - likely it represents more the coverage depth decisions made by individual authors and editors more than anything else. Still fun.

Comments

[rishav]

and thats why we love ruby !!!! \o/

[ck1]

240 pages for the Cliff Notes version of UML? Really? 240 pages on line drawings?

[Mark Menard]

Mike,

That's really interesting. I have earlier editions of some of those books and by my recollection the page counts are much smaller. Ruby is very concise for both implementation and explanation. That's what I really like about it. I hope it stays that way, but if history is any indicator the next edition will likely be larger.

Mark

[robokos]

Can anyone confirm the font sizes in each book are the same ;-)

[Wynn Netherland]

Good stuff, Mike. I love analysis like this. From the title I couldn't help but think of Austin Powers though:

Vanessa Kensington: That's you in a nutshell.
Austin Powers: No, this is me in a nutshell: "Help! I'm in a nutshell! How did I get into this bloody great big nutshell? What kind of shell has a nut like this?"